The processing and handling of mailpieces consumes an enormous amount of human and financial resources, particularly if the processing of the mailpieces is done manually. The processing and handling of mailpieces not only takes place at the Postal Service, but also occurs at each and every business or other site where communication via the mail delivery system is utilized. That is, various pieces of mail generated by a plurality of departments and individuals within a company need to be addressed, collected, sorted and franked as part of the outgoing mail process. Additionally, incoming mail needs to be collected and sorted efficiently to ensure that it gets to the addressee in a minimal amount of time. Since much of the documentation and information being conveyed through the mail system is critical in nature relative to the success of a business, it is imperative that the processing and handling of both the incoming and outgoing mailpieces be done efficiently and reliably so as not to negatively impact the functioning of the business. Additionally, it would be helpful if the expense of the time consuming task of sorting the mail could be accounted for and charged back to various departments of the company for which the mail is being sorted.
Mailroom expenses have typically been charged to various departments of the company that a mailroom serves by using allocation accounting methods. The total cost of running the mailroom is calculated and a percentage of that cost is allocated to each department that a mailroom serves. The percentage could be calculated for example, by using a square footage calculation such that a department that occupies 10% of the square footage of a building which the mailroom provides services to is allocated 10% of the mailroom cost. The allocation method however is inexact. Another method of attributing mailroom costs to the departments that the mailroom provides services to, is to charge back metering costs for outgoing mail. This is called post-centric charge back and is used for outgoing mail. Outgoing mail needs to be affixed with proper postage. Postage meters used to frank mailpieces can include accounting functionality that allow postage costs to be attributed to the department from which the mail originated. This method allows for more precise chargeback of the departments. However, this method is only available for outgoing mail. The distribution of mailroom costs for incoming mail still relies on allocation methods. Incoming mail has been franked at its origin and therefore, simply needs to be sorted and distributed upon arriving at the addressee's mailroom.
Various automated mail handling machines have been developed for processing incoming mail (removing individual pieces of mail from a stack and performing subsequent actions on each individual piece of mail). Generally, the mail handling machines separate individual mailpieces from a stack, read the mailpieces using an optical character recognition system (OCR) and compare the read information to an addressee database in order to determine the appropriate destination points for delivery of the mailpieces. However, these mail handling machines do not include functionality that would track the numbers and types of mailpieces that are sorted for each of the departments of the company for which the mail is being sorted, and calculate a charge back amount for accounting of mailroom expenses.
Thus, one of the problems of the prior art is that a system is not available for calculating charge back costs for incoming mail sorting. Another problem of the prior art is that expense allocation can be imprecise. Yet another problem of the prior art is that incoming mail handling machines do not provide detailed information for charge back accounting. Therefore, a method that calculates charge back cost of incoming mail sorting is needed